Microsoft Bing News Search

Microsoft Bing News Search

August 27, 2009

Amongst all of the excitement about Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, one element of the new service that hasn’t received a huge amount of coverage is its news search function. Bing News Search offers a similar service to Google News, so I’ve it added toour News Aggregators category. Since its launch the site has maintained a market share of around 2% in the News Aggregator market and, as you can see from the table below, last week Bing News Search ranked ninth in the category..

Last week just over three quarters of Bing News Search’s traffic came from other Microsoft properties, particularly MSN UK and the main Bing search page. Like Google News (but unlike Yahoo! News), Microsoft’s new service consists of links to third party news providers rather than its own content. In order to compare the different news sources that each services ‘prefers’, the tables below list the top 10 News and Media websites receiving UK Internet traffic from Bing News Search and Google News UK.

Based on these two tables it seems that Google News UK ‘prefers’ UK newspaper websites, while Bing News Search sends more of its traffic to TV and overseas news sites (e.g. Fox News, Times of India). The sites also have quite different audience profiles. The table below details the Experian Mosaic segmentation for both sites, and you can see that Bing News Search is stronger amongst less wealthy and more conservative readers (e.g. Blue Collar Enterprise, Municipal Dependency and Twilight Subsistence), while Google News is preferred by wealthier and more liberal groups (e.g. Urban Intelligence, Symbols of Success and Suburban Comfort).